Zyzzyva, West Coast literary journal, marks its 100th issue

Updated 3:25 pm, Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Daniel Handler (center) hosts a game show at Zyzzyva's 100th-issue celebration at the California Historical Society in S.F. To his right are Zyzzyva’s managing editor, Oscar Villalon, and editor, Laura Cogan.

Daniel Handler (center) hosts a game show at Zyzzyva's 100th-issue celebration at the California Historical Society in S.F. To his right are Zyzzyva’s managing editor, Oscar Villalon, and editor, Laura Cogan.

Daniel Handler likes walking around San Francisco's North Beach, stopping in for coffee, and losing himself in the writing and poetry of the literary magazine Zyzzyva.

Handler, best known for his work under the pen name Lemony Snicket, likens reading Zyzzyva to attending a dinner party where "you go and end up sitting next to old friends, people you haven't thought about in years, and people you've never heard of. And you leave full and happy."

Zyzzyva, the literary journal published three times a year and founded by Howard Junker in San Francisco in 1985, recently published the 100th issue, full of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art and photography. True to its founding principle, nearly all of the contributors are from the West Coast.

"The New York literary scene often treats West Coast writers like we're hippies living God knows where," Handler said. "Zyzzyva is a reminder of how diverse and exciting our coast can be."

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"At times it seems a literary journal may be hopelessly out of step with contemporary culture," write Zyzzyva editors Laura Cogan and Oscar Villalon in the preface to the issue. "It is a radically unhip project; a gentle kind of countercultural movement. ... It is all too easy, too seductive, to succumb to a perpetually distracted state. We need a space for reflection. We need room to recognize what is meaningful, to linger for a moment in quietude, in sadness, in uncertainty, in joy."

The editors write, "In an environment crowded with dazzling and questionable new technologies, Zyzzyva asserts the cerebral and tactile pleasures of reading, of holding a well-bound book in your hands, of losing - and finding - yourself in the pages of a story."

"Literary excellence will always find readers," noted Paul Yamazaki, the book buyer at City Lights in San Francisco. "The literary magazine continues to be one of the best portals into the world of contemporary literature. Magazines like Zyzzyva are the mariner's logs of literature."

Yamazaki added, "City Lights' history with Zyzzyva goes back to issue No. 1. City Lights recognized that Zyzzyva was a literary journal of exceptional quality, and Laura's and Oscar's vision carries Zyzzyva into the 21st century."

Zyzzyva founder Junker left the journal in December 2010, handing responsibilities over to then-Managing Editor Cogan. Cogan hired Villalon, formerly the book editor at The Chronicle, in January 2011.

Their mission was to "keep this valuable cultural institution going," Villalon said.

"Howard and the people around him had created this wonderful San Francisco journal of arts and letters," Villalon said. "It had this incredible pedigree. The idea was basically for us to keep it going. We did a redesign, and we found writers we know and love and asked them to contribute."

Villalon added, "In a perfect scenario, we could keep this going for decades, and when we retire, there will be someone else to keep it going. The journal belongs to the city."

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